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Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Documentation -Updated 2Xs

By Pamela Jones et al.

The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has just signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Samba and other Free Software projects. Here's a podcast where Samba's Jeremy Allison explains the news to Don Marti of LinuxWorld.

No. This isn't a bit like the Novell-Microsoft agreements. This is for access to Microsoft's protocols, as ordered by the EU Commission and agreed to by Microsoft. It's a good thing, in my opinion, and the Samba guys worked really hard to make this as good as it gets. Note that it's a copyright agreement, with no per-copy royalties, not a patent licensing, but there's a list of patents. Samba has not agreed to license them. Rather it will avoid them, and with a list of them provided by Microsoft, they can and so can you. There is no acknowledgment of them by Samba, no money paid for them, nothing. This is what Novell and others could have done, and thanks to Samba, everyone is a bit freer today.

Here's the press release, and two articles that explain a bit about how it came to be and what the agreement contains, both written by Andrew Tridgell, the creator of Samba. And here is the agreement [PDF] itself. Note that a Delaware corporation was formed for the purpose, The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, and it is the licensee. So it can provide "detailed documentation on Microsoft protocols to developers in the free software community under non-disclosure terms, while still allowing for the development of free software under open licenses, including the GNU General Public License". That means, as Tridgell puts it, "Writing code which interoperates with Microsoft operating systems just got a lot easier." First, the press release, then the history, then the contents of the agreement explained from Tridge's perspective, how he understands the agreement. And he even provides a redline version [PDF], so you can see the original agreement Microsoft proposed and all the changes that ensued.

Update: There's a Microsoft reaction in this Reuters article, Microsoft signs rare open-source deal, under EU orders. They are "pleased".

Update 2: Carlo Piana, one of the attorneys involved on the Samba side, has now commented on the agreement on his blog, Law is Freedom, explaining it, and providing this information: "The total number of pages of which the documentation is made is 14820."

Full post as published by Groklaw on December 20, 2007 (boomark / email).